IS DIGITAL MEDICINE A STANDARDS NIGHTMARE?

Thomas Lucy-Bouler, Ph.D., and Daniel Morgenstern, M.D.

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 2003)

As technology has increased, one industry that has been slow in implementing technology is the healthcare industry. Doctors, with handheld devices, going room to room with real time information on each patient is not a reality in most hospitals today. Implementation has been slowed by multiple standards for healthcare data, and the HIPAA act that has brought up security issues for patient data. Also, research is being done in two non-convergent fields. This paper describes the standards and the problems with developing healthcare information systems.